DL Open Thread: Tuesday, February 11, 2025

A Day In The Life Of A Fascist State:

Trump’s DOJ Orders Charges Dropped Against NYC’s Corrupt Mayor.  After Eric Adams virtually took up residence at Mar-A-Lago.

Trump Orders Consumer Protection Agency Shut Down.  More accurately, the co-author of Project 2025 orders it shut down.

In theory, it would take congressional action to close the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. After all, Congress created the CFPB, and it would fall to Congress to kill the CFPB.

In practice, however, Vought, one of the key authors of the right-wing Project 2025 blueprint, has a different approach in mind: The White House’s budget director appears eager to effectively eliminate the watchdog agency by gutting it from within.

Indeed, there’s nothing subtle about Vought’s latest directives: The CFPB’s functions have been halted. The bureau’s workforce has been told to stop its efforts and suspend any and all investigations on behalf of consumers. Employees have been told that the agency’s headquarters in the nation’s capital will be closed this week.

In case that was too subtle, Vought also announced that the CFPB will not be spending the money that’s already been allocated to the agency. It came the day after Elon Musk published a message to his social media platform on Friday that read, “CFPB RIP.”

The Big One?:  Leaders of the Fascist State ready to ignore court orders?:

As of Monday morning, at least10 judges have issued rulings halting what the administration is doing and seeking to do. That’s 10 rulings in the 21 days since Trump was inaugurated — a staggering clip that reflects just how much Trump is disregarding federal statutes and legal precedent.

And as that clash builds, it’s becoming increasingly valid to consider the seemingly unthinkable: Trump and his administration simply defying those court orders and launching the country into a full-blown constitutional crisis.

It sounds alarmist. But Trump and Co. are not exactly downplaying that possibility. And you could be forgiven for thinking they’re laying a pretext for doing it.

In addition, a judge said Monday that there is evidence the administration has already violated a “clear and unambiguous” court order — even if not deliberately — that sought to halt its federal funding freeze.

To recap: A federal judge on Saturday issued an order blocking Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service from accessing the Treasury Department’s personal and financial data for millions of Americans. The judge aligned with the argument that these data can be legally accessed only by civil servants who specialize in that area and who have “a need for access to perform their job duties.”

But almost instantly, prominent Trump allies cast the decision as being much broader than that. They claimed the order also prevented Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent from accessing such data and labeled it an affront to the Constitution.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said it felt like a judicial “coup.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) called the judge, U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, an “outlaw” who should be forbidden to hear cases involving the Trump administration. Musk and former congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) said the judge should be impeached. And Musk promoted an X user who floated defying the order.

Trump Fires Military ‘Board Of Visitors’.  Biden did the same thing:

President Donald Trump said Monday he fired the boards of visitors at four U.S. service academies, claiming they had been “infiltrated by woke leftist ideologies.”

Trump ordered the immediate dismissal of board members at the Military Academy in West Point, New York; the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland; the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado; and the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut.

“We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards,” Trump wrote on his social network platform, Truth Social. “We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”

The Real President Flexes His Financial Muscle:

A recent Elon Musk-led bid for OpenAI’s nonprofit assets could complicate Sam Altman’s ambitions to turn the AI lab into a for-profit corporation.

On Monday, Musk led a group of investors in submitting a $97.4 billion for the AI company’s nonprofit assets to OpenAI’s board, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Since then, Altman has made a point of insisting the company is not for sale, rebuffing the offer privately to staff, in several media interviews, and via a public post on X.

“No thank you,” he said in an X post that appeared to reference the Musk-led bid. “But we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”

In an interview with Sky Newsat the AI Action Summit in Paris, the OpenAI CEO reiterated that the company was “not for sale,” calling Musk a not “serious person.”